


how we fall

by honey_wheeler



Category: Skins (UK)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hospital, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 05:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Is this some sort of Truly, Madly, Deeply thing where you move into my house and play the cello and invite your dead loser friends round all the time?” she asks. It doesn’t sound half bad, actually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how we fall

**  
_but in the morning i can smell you on my pillow_   
**

Jal’s in his hospital bed with him when he wakes up, snaked up under the tubing and wires with her nose pressed against his ear. It’s a nice surprise. Nearly as nice of a surprise as waking up in the first place. He’d had his doubts. He vaguely remembers a slurred attempt at dictating his last will and testament to one of the nurses after she’d jabbed him with a massive needle and set him up with a drip of the best drugs he’d ever had.

He’s trying to remember who he left his sock collection to when she stirs against him, making sleepy noises, like a kitten. She’d always hated waking up. The fact that he got to watch her do it so many times strikes him now as a ludicrous piece of luck and he can’t help squeezing her a bit.

“I’m up, I’m up,” she mumbles, even as she settles deeper into the bed next to him.

“Here I am on my deathbed and you’re lying to my face,” he remarks happily.

“I’m not even looking at your face, I can hardly be lying to it,” she retorts sleepily. Then she stiffens and he feels her eyelashes sweep up against his neck as she comes fully awake. “ _Deathbed?_ ” she demands. “The hospital. How could I have forgotten…” She tries to sit up and is brought up short by the oxygen tubes connected to his now smarting nostrils.

“Hey, ow!” he exclaims, reaching for the tubes and pulling them free. He doesn’t really need them anymore, anyhow. He can breathe just fine. “Please do your best not to kill me now that I’ve cheated death, if you don’t mind.”

“Not funny,” she tells him with a smack to his arm. She carefully disentangles herself and kneels next to him, her hip pressing against his. Her clothes are rumpled and twisted. He reaches out and tugs one rucked up sleeve back into place.

“How’d you get up here in bed with me anyway?” he asks. “Bribe a nurse?”

“Just about,” she answers. “And don’t ask what with, because I’m not telling.”

“Ooh, was it sexual favours?” he leers. “I bet it was sexual favours. Can I watch?”

“Not in your weakened state, I’m afraid.” She grins at him, but then her face turns serious and he braces himself for what he knows is coming. “Chris, why didn’t you tell me?” He sighs and lowers his eyes. He can’t take the disappointed expression on her face. It never used to bother him when people were disappointed with him.

“Chris?” she prompts. She’s got the oxygen tubing between her fingers and she pinches and twists it. There’s a tiny patch of red on the nail of her index finger, the last remnant of a long-ago manicure, and he reaches out to touch that spot of colour with his fingertip.

“If I say, ‘I didn’t want you to worry,’ will you believe it?” he asks. She raises her eyebrow, purses her lips. “Right then, didn’t think so.” He sighs again. How to explain to her what he doesn’t really understand himself?

“Maybe I didn’t want to make it real,” he says finally, still studying the chip of polish on her fingernail. “Things have been brilliant with you. I’m not used to having something to lose, y’know? So I…pretended I couldn’t lose it, I guess.” He chances a look up at her. He expects her to be cross with him, but she’s got this soft, sad smile on her face, like she understands, and for the first time he kind of feels like crying over the whole mess. “Guess the jig is up, yeah?”

“Guess so.” Then a frown beetles her forehead. “But why you? It’s not fair,” she says with a sigh.

“Life’s not fair,” he answers.

“Yes, but why does it have to be unfair for the important things?” she demands. “I wouldn’t give a shit if it were unfair about…about having nice teeth or being allergic to peanuts or something stupid.”

“I doubt people with deathly peanut allergies would appreciate your flippancy,” he tells her with an affectionate poke to her belly, her sweet-soft belly that he’s been missing lately, what with her off practicing her music and being brilliant and all around tops.

“Why does it have to be unfair about you?” she says, ignoring him.

“Ah, a question I would have asked myself many times had I not discovered recreational narcotics,” he quips, but he pulls her down alongside him all the same, tucks her head under his chin. He’s had a lifetime to come to terms with it. She’s only had a day. He hears her sniffle just a moment before he feels her hot tears slide down his neck and into the collar of his hospital gown.

“I’m sorry,” she snuffles. “You’d probably rather I didn’t cry.”

“Are you fuckin’ mad?” he counters. “How else would I know you care? I expect buckets of tears. Rivers, oceans, floods of biblical proportions!”

“Good,” she says with a watery laugh. “I’ll get straight to work.”

 

 **  
_i need to know we won’t get wrung out in the wash_   
**

“Chris.” It’s a dream. It has to be. She’s going to his funeral in just a few hours. He’s not in her bedroom. He’s not jumping in to her bed and tackling her, rolling her over until she’s dizzy. He can’t be. But then how can she feel his rough hands, his slippery soft hair, how can she smell the scent that only belongs to him? “Is it really you?”

“In the epidermis,” he tells her with a grin. Oh, she misses that grin. She saw it only days ago but it already seems like a lifetime. “How’s my Jal-gal?”

“Terrible, thanks,” she says in a bit of a daze. “And you?”

“Dead,” he shrugs, and she frowns at him.

“Not funny.”

“Ah, but humor is a balm for the soul in these troubled times, my sweet. Especially dark humor.”

“Well, I liked it better when you were only dead for three minutes,” she grumps.

“Can’t argue with you on that one. Come on, then.” He grabs her hands and heaves her up to a sitting position, and then sits facing her, both of them cross-legged on her bed, hands still clasped, like he isn’t dead and in a coffin, waiting to be buried. She regards him suspiciously.

“Is this some sort of Truly, Madly, Deeply thing where you move into my house and play the cello and invite your dead loser friends round all the time?” she asks. It doesn’t sound half bad, actually.

“Dunno,” he shrugs. “Your dream, innit?”

“Is this a dream?” she muses. “It feels real.”

“Then make it real,” he says. “It you want it to be, then it is.” It makes her smile.

“You always were like that, weren’t you? You always had a knack for turning life into what you wanted it to be.”

“Only got one life, and all that carpe diem inspirational crap,” he grins. “’Course I kind of got two, didn’t I? A second chance and all. Two cracks at life and my lovely Jalander. I sure was a lucky bloke.”

“Lucky,” she says with a grim laugh.

“Yeah,” he insists. “Lucky. And I probably would have been bloody brilliant at the cello.”

She can’t help but smile at that. But then her grin fades. She can see the sky starting to lighten through the windows, the inky night fading to charcoal, a few early-rising birds making tentative chirps in the trees. It’ll be light soon. It’ll be bright and sunny and she’ll have to watch him lowered into the ground. She’ll have to say goodbye.

“I want it to be real,” she whispers. “I don’t want you to go.”

“Have to go sometime, yeah? No one lives forever, my spicy jalapeno. Not even a superhero like me.” She knows he’s right. But still.

“Just don’t go yet,” she says.

“No, I won’t. I’ll stay right here with you.” He holds her hands in his, knocks her knuckles together softly. His smile is so gentle, his eyes so kind. She remembers their first time. How careful he was, how gentle and sweet and how it allowed her to be as forceful and demanding as she wanted; pushing him, pulling him, saying, _come on, come on, come on,_ in his ear until his eyes lost focus and he jerked inside her. It never occurred to her to wonder if she deserved him before now.

“Chris…”

“Yeah?”

She struggles to say the words that have been eating her alive, but she can’t. They dry up in her throat. He seems to realize and he leans forward to drop a kiss on the tip of her nose. “Want to get under the duvet?” he offers. She nods in relief and together they crawl inside.

It’s dark and shadowed under the fabric, barely any light filtering through. But she can still see him perfectly. The fabric pulls down on the top of her head. Somehow it makes her a tiny bit braver. She takes a deep breath before she starts.

“I wasn’t there. You died and I wasn’t there.” The words are lead weights in her stomach. She can barely get them out.

“Sure you were,” he insists. “Just because you weren’t _in_ the _room_ doesn’t mean you weren’t _there_. You were always there. You were always _here_.” He pats lightly at his heart. “I knew that, even if you didn’t.” She has to stare at his hand to keep from crying, because she’s afraid if she starts, she’ll never stop. There’s dirt under his nails, still. Leave it to Chris to die with dirty fingernails.

“Were you always a better person than me, or is that a recent development?” she asks his fingernails. He takes his hand from his chest and she watches it come closer to her until she can feel his knuckles under her chin, tilting her face up to his.

“I like to keep that sort of thing under wraps,” he tells her, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Nobody likes a braggart.”

She doesn’t know how long they stay like that. Her eyes are closed but she can feel the sky lightening, making a red glow spread behind her eyelids. He’ll have to go soon.

“Jal,” he says, lips moving against her forehead, but his voice sounds funny, all high and thin. “Jal, are you awake?” She opens her eyes, expecting to see his face. Instead she sees her window, her wall, the blue of the sky outside. Her hand drifts to her stomach. She wonders when she’ll stop feeling pregnant.

“Jal?” the voice repeats. Michelle, not Chris. It’s Michelle in the bed next to her. She closes her eyes again, pretends she’s still asleep. Hopes she’ll see Chris’ face again. But he’s gone.

 

 **  
_i must believe there’s time for some of us_   
**

They make a motley group, really, the lot of them. They’re milling around the apartment, sprawling on the couches, getting quieter and quieter as the time for the funeral approaches. If Chris were there, he would have made them all laugh. Then given them all pills.

“Jal.” She looks up at Sid. He’s still wearing that stupid fucking hat and his shirt is stained. Same old Sid. She kind of loves him for it. “You about ready?” She shakes her head. She’s not at all ready.

“I’m not sure what I should say,” she admits. “How d’you figure out what to say at your boyfriend’s…” She chokes on the word ‘funeral,’ can’t get it out. Sid puts a comforting hand on the top of her head. “I don’t know what he’d want me to say.”

“He’d want you to say he had a huge cock and was dynamite in bed,” Tony supplies from his seat at the kitchen table.

“Tony,” Michelle warns.

“No, it’s true, he would,” Anwar agrees, nodding thoughtfully.

“I can’t very well say that,” Jal says, annoyed, even though it probably _is_ true. Fat lot of help _they_ are.

“You’re on your own then, love,” Maxxie tells her. Kenneth calls from outside and everyone stands up, starts making their way out the door. Maxxie stops in front of her, drops a kiss on the part of her hair. “You’ll figure it out,” he says. “I have faith in you. You just have to jump and see what happens.” It jars a memory, a half-forgotten conversation. Suddenly she knows exactly what to say.

“Jump,” she says. “Yes. I just have to jump.” He smiles at her, offers her his hand and hauls her up from the couch. Michelle’s waiting for them at the door. She takes Jal’s other hand and squeezes. Jal smiles.

“Okay,” she tells them. “Let’s jump.”

 

  
_title and subtitles from “Memories and Dust” by Josh Pyke_   



End file.
